AMID THE EULOGIES ASSOCIATED WITH the eightieth anniversary of Ingeborg Bachmann’s birth in 2006, an essay by the German writer Ulrike Draesner sounded a distinctive and controversial note. Draesner’s essay engaged critically with Bachmann’s work but also examined her literary persona and reflected more generally on the way the cultural impact of a female author is constructed. Of course other writers had touched on this territory before. In 2001 the Austrian writer Franzobel had dubbed Bachmann “eine Art Vorreiterin des Girlie-Wunders … [e]ine erste Pop-Ikone der österreichischen Literatur” (a sort of predecessor of the chicklitmiracle … the first pop icon of Austrian literature). However, the particular significance of Draesner’s essay, along with another perhaps even more critical one of 2004 by the prominent Austrian poet and novelist Evelyn Schlag, lies in the fact that they come from female writers who have engaged seriously with the famous Austrian writer and whose own writing clearly draws on Bachmann’s legacy.

Draesner and Schlag’s essays are intensely personal attempts to read Bachmann and understand the impact of her work on their own. They reflect on what they see as a problematic aesthetic of authenticity in her writing; but they also consider posterity’s troubled relationship to her and make wider points about the way women writers are codified and neutralized culturally and the difficulties attending the transmission of a female tradition. This chapter does not simply seek to chart the changing literary reception of a notable writer, however; it addresses cultural impact in a wider sense. It traces the ways in which biographical self, authorial persona, literary reception, and media-constructed myth are intertwined in the case of Bachmann so that any clear distinction between first-, second-, and third-order cultural impact (to borrow the terms used by Rebecca Braun in her chapter earlier in this volume) are undermined. It can be argued that the case of Bachmann illuminates the interplay among various factors in the mythologization of an author in an exemplary way. First, it coincides with a moment of historical transition between discrete understandings of authorship. Second, it marks the very beginning of the process of marketing authorship in the age of digitized mass media.